Second Glass is taking Wine Riot, its millennial-focused wine-tasting event series, to the streets, with plans to open a retail store on Tremont Street in Boston's tony South End neighborhood.
Second Glass founders Morgan First and Tyler Balliet have bootstrapped their mass-wine-tasting event series into three cities--Boston, New York and Chicago--with the largest events taking place in New York, at 6,000 people per.
"When we set out to do Wine Riot initially we built it to scale. I am not going to do an event in just one city. I want to take it nationally," Balliet told me. "We are using the same thoughts when we're building this. I don't like speculating. I like talking about what I have. But that's the idea."
The events come with an app for remembering what you taste and whether you liked it. Balliet says they're using the information they've gleaned from the app's users to make a more user-friendly wine store. Wine distributors and retailers, Balliet says, spend too much time with their noses in wine blogs, not enough time listening to their customers: "You have in the US right now more wine buyers than ever before and the wine distributors will not listen to them."
Judging by its number of App Store reviews (41, lifetime), Wine Riot's mobile app has a ways to go to get large-scale user input. Drync, another wine app out of Boston, has 422 reviews. The Vivino Wine Scanner has 1,997. Both Vivino and Drync have average ratings in the fours (out of five), while Wine Riot's average score is in the mid-twos--a negative score Balliet said came after glitches the app ran into last fall.
"Right now the wine industry, they're using technical language as marketing copy."
Still, Wine Riot has succeeded at packing in visitors to its events. Balliet told me the events business, bootstrapped from a small friends-and-family round, has brought the company close to $2 million in annual revenue. That's where it's pulling data from--15,000 to 20,000 reviews in a weekend, Balliet said.
I went to one at The Castle at Park Plaza in Boston, which maxes out at 1,000, last October. (Second Glass brought more than that in, holding events over two days.) The pours were the right size for tasting: Plenty of people looked buzzed, but I didn't see anyone make a mess. I also wasn't the oldest person there. Second Glass was running small-group classes in partitioned sections of the hall and tables focused on various aspects of wine tasting (oaked vs. unoaked, for example).
Balliet said Second Glass plans to do more events, expanding into smaller, sponsored gatherings from 50-person tasting dinners to 200-person things. The company has done Wine Riot events in Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but has pulled back from those cities to focus on Boston, New York and Chicago, he said.
Balliet says he and First believe from what they've learned with Wine Riot that they can do better at selling wine than the legacy merchants and distributors. American wine buyers are "overwhelmed" by the "wall of wine" that confronts them in a typical store, he said. What they'll find at the 3,000 square-foot retail space Second Glass has leased at 519 Tremont St. will be different.
That's assuming Second Glass can get the necessary permits. They have a neighborhood meeting about it, Wednesday night and a petition online to support their effort.
Balliet compared wine sales in 2016 to computer sales in the 1990s. Sellers are using "technical language as marketing copy," instead of a more accessible narrative. "Steve Jobs shows up and he's like, 'Here, you can watch videos and call your friends,'" Balliet said. "And you're like, 'Here, take my money.'"
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story had Second Glass' proposed wine store at 518 Tremont. It is in fact at 519 Tremont.
